Tag: Career

  • Wellesley Surpasses $100K Sticker Price

    Wellesley Surpasses $100K Sticker Price

    Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

    Wellesley College appears to be the first higher ed institution in the nation to hit the $100,000 annual sticker price.

    The cost to attend the all-women’s college this coming fall will be $100,541, as Boston Business Journal first reported. That includes direct costs of $92,440—which covers undergraduate tuition, housing, fees and meals—plus indirect costs, such as books, personal expenses, travel, transportation, and optional health insurance. Wellesley now appears to be the most expensive college in the country.

    Various other universities have approached the six-figure mark for undergraduate tuition and indirect costs in recent years but managed to remain below it. When Inside Higher Ed explored this issue last year, it appeared that Vanderbilt University might be the first to cross the threshold, with estimated costs for undergraduate students in certain programs, such as engineering, hitting almost $98,000. Others at or over the $90,000 line include the University of Chicago, the University of Southern California, Washington University in St. Louis and Tufts University, and a handful of other highly selective, private institutions.

    Wellesley spokesperson Stacey Schmeidel wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed Tuesday that the college “meets 100% of the calculated need for all students” and is “committed to making a Wellesley education accessible to all.” Additionally, she noted that “loans are eliminated for students with total parent income less than $100,000 and calculated family contribution of less than $28,000. The average indebtedness of our 2023 graduates is $18,500, well below the national average.”

    She added that indirect costs vary by student and “the majority” do not pay sticker price.

    Schmeidel also wrote that more than 50 percent of students decline the optional health insurance, which, at $4,051, is the most expensive item on the list of indirect costs. Of those who do opt in, nearly half receive institutional grants to cover the entire cost, she noted.

    Despite the potential sticker shock, Wellesley’s website plugs an education that is “more affordable than you think.” Wellesley has a financial aid budget of more than $84 million, according to its website.

    That is also the case at many other well-endowed colleges where, regardless of the listed price, most students don’t pay the full amount. Tuition discounting has soared in recent years and remains well over 50 percent across the U.S. A recent study of 325 private nonprofit colleges conducted by the National Association of College and University Business Officers pegged the average tuition discount rate for first-time, full-time students at 56 percent, and 52 percent for all undergraduate students. Both numbers are all-time highs.

    While public concerns about higher education have often focused on college costs, debt and the return on investment, Wellesley and its high-priced peers are outliers in terms of cost. A recent College Board analysis found that in the 2024–25 academic year, the average sticker price was $43,350 for private nonprofit four-year institutions, $30,780 for out-of-state students attending public universities, and $11,610 for in-state students at public universities.

    Bryan Alexander, a senior scholar at Georgetown University who has been writing about college costs nearing the $100,000 mark since 2018, correctly predicted in 2023 that Wellesley would be one of the first institutions to reach six figures by the 2026–27 academic year.

    Asked what he thought about his prediction coming to pass, Alexander responded with multiple questions.

    “Will this pricing make the college more desirable, as a luxury good? Or will it drive away would-be students from sticker shock?” he wrote by email. “How many universities, scared of [the Trump administration], will make such a price hike to raise funds when grants are cut?”

    He also pondered what it might mean for public perception, writing, “Wellesley is a small liberal arts college, but some universities are also playing this pricing game. Will [small liberal arts colleges] become seen as too pricey, or will all of higher ed get tarred with this brush?”

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  • Cornell Student Who Faced Deportation Leaves the Country

    Cornell Student Who Faced Deportation Leaves the Country

    Momodou Taal, the Cornell University graduate student who said his institution effectively tried to deport him in the fall over his pro-Palestine activism, announced Monday he’s leaving the U.S. of his own accord under threat from the Trump administration.

    “I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being abducted,” Taal wrote on X. He added that “we are facing a government that has no respect for the judiciary or for the rule of the law.”

    On March 15, Taal, his professor and another Cornell Ph.D. student sued President Trump, the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, challenging executive orders that empowered immigration officials to deport noncitizens they deem national security threats. Immigration officers have targeted multiple international students suspected of participating in pro-Palestine protests. Taal is a U.K. and Gambian citizen.

    A few days after he sued, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents visited Taal in what Homeland Security acknowledged “was an attempt to detain him,” he said in a court filing. The State Department had revoked Taal’s visa, according to the lawsuit.

    Now his lawyers have dismissed the case. “Trump did not want me to have my day in court and sent ICE agents to my home,” Taal wrote on X.

    In an email to Inside Higher Ed Tuesday, an unnamed “senior” Homeland Security official called it “a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study” in the U.S.

    “When you advocate for violence and terrorism, that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country,” the official said. “We are pleased to confirm that this Cornell University terrorist sympathizer heeded Secretary Noem’s advice to self-deport.”

    When asked for specifics on when Taal sympathized with terrorism, Homeland Security pointed to where Taal referenced in his Monday post the “Zionist genocide,” and wrote, “Long live the student intifada!” In his post, Taal wrote that the “repression of Palestinian solidarity is now being used to wage a wholesale attack on any form of expression that challenges oppressive and exploitative relations in the US.”

    Taal added, “If you have been led to think that your safety is only guaranteed by state kidnap, repression, deportation, the slaughter of children, and the suppression of the global majority, then let Gaza’s shards of glass be your mirror.”

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  • U of Washington Research Coordinators, Consultants Unionize

    U of Washington Research Coordinators, Consultants Unionize

    More than 700 University of Washington research coordinators and consultants have unionized, joining already organized research scientists and engineers there to create a bargaining unit more than 2,000 members strong, the union announced.

    UAW 4121 said in a news release Tuesday that research coordinators and consultants are largely health-care professionals focused on research.

    “They are responsible for running clinical trials, liaising with patients and scientists, and ensuring that research results are grounded in rigorous science,” the release said. “Despite the critical role they play at the university, many report job insecurity, a lack of transparency around career advancement and workload, low compensation relative to cost of living, and more as their reasons for forming a union.”

    “The University of Washington recognizes and respects the right of employees to organize,” university spokesperson Victor Balta wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “UW values the research coordinators and consultants who help make vital work possible and we look forward to negotiating in good faith their inclusion into the existing UAW 4121 bargaining unit of research scientists and research engineers.”

    Mike Sellars, executive director of Washington State’s Public Employment Relations Commission, said his agency certified the unionization of the research coordinators and consultants Thursday. Nearly 400 employees submitted cards in favor of unionizing. A union spokesperson said cards were collected over the past year.

    Mike Miller, director of UAW Region 6, said in the news release, “As workers and workers rights’ are under assault by the Trump administration, it’s never been more important to have the rights and protections of a union.”

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  • Former Harvard President Looks Back on Decades of Protests

    Former Harvard President Looks Back on Decades of Protests

    In 1967, in the midst of the Vietnam War, Harvard University English professor Neil Rudenstine intervened in a protest on campus, where a recruiter from Dow Chemical Company, which made napalm, had been surrounded by students upset about U.S. attacks on Vietnamese civilians. He helped defuse the tension by negotiating with students to release the recruiter.

    That foray into conflict resolution prompted an unexpected shift from a budding literary career to academic administration. Rudenstine would then go on to serve as dean of students at Princeton University and in other roles before making his way back to Harvard as president, a job he held from 1991 to 2001.

    Now 90, Rudenstine released a book last month titled Our Contentious Universities: A Personal History (The American Philosophical Society Press) that is partly a memoir and partly an exploration of campus protests movements across multiple decades and causes.

    Rudenstine discussed the book with Inside Higher Ed, sharing his personal experiences of protests in years past and his thoughts on the latest wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

    Excerpts of the conversation have been edited for length and clarity.

    Q: What motivated you to write this book?

    A: From my point of view, increasing student protests starting in the ’90s seemed to be different from those of the ’60s, and more complicated to deal with. So I began to try to find out what the differences were and what the results might be of the new movement, so to speak. That got me immersed to look again at the 1960s, and after that, events began to take over.

    Q: What differences do you see in protests of the past versus today?

    A: In the ’60s, student protests were quite violent at times, but they were all mainly concerned with the Vietnam War. Of course, there were other things, like student protests over apartheid in South Africa [in the 1980s]. But the main issue in the 1960s was the war, and students were essentially united in their feelings against the war. There was virtually no sense of students in any way protesting against one another, or student groups disagreeing with other student groups. It was a united feeling.

    It was also a feeling that if the war were to come to an end, the protests would probably also come to an end. In the ’90s and afterward, students were far more diverse. There were more Black students, Jewish students, Asian American students, first-generation students and so on. These groups did not necessarily agree with one another in terms of what was important to protest against, and they sometimes protested against one another. So the situation was very different; there was no single overriding issue like the war.

    Q: Tell me about your own protest experiences, starting when you were a professor at Harvard in 1967 and helped bring an end to a protest organized by Students for a Democratic Society.

    A: I was, at the time, an assistant professor of English literature, and totally absorbed by that job at Harvard. One day I was walking across campus outside of Harvard Yard, and I heard shouting and cheering going on around [Mallinckrodt Laboratory], which was a chemistry building. It turned out that Students for a Democratic Society had organized a protest that imprisoned a recruiter for the Dow Chemical Company who wanted to interview students for jobs. And since Dow was making some products [such as napalm] that were used in the war, the SDS students decided to imprison this recruiter.

    Purely by chance, I stopped by, and I thought it was not proper of the university to imprison a recruiter who’d come to interview students and told the students that by using their megaphone. After several hours of discussion and debate, the students released the recruiter and gave up the protest. I was somehow identified as the person who had helped to bring this about, and that led to me being asked to be dean of students at Princeton University to help with their protest movements. A very considerable accident got in the way of my literary career and deflected me from literature to student protests in a way that I had never imagined. It was purely the result of chance and serendipity.

    Q: Near the end of your career, students staged a sit-in to demand a living wage at Harvard. How were you able to wind that protest down without police intervention?

    A: That was a very complicated situation. Students sat in my office building, Massachusetts Hall, because they wanted to change the way in which many people at the university were reimbursed for their services. The living wage protest was not very rational. If they had wanted a minimum wage change, we might have been able to discuss it, but the method they chose was not rational, and they sat in the building for more than two weeks. So we had a very complicated and delicate situation.

    I decided at the beginning that whatever we would do, we would not call the police, because calling the police in earlier days at Columbia, Harvard, Kent State and other places had led to terrible situations of riots and police beating students. So the question was, how can we not call the police but also bring the situation to a conclusion? It took many, many days of discussion and waiting in order to try to find this conclusion.

    What happened was that the next president [Larry Summers] said, “Why don’t you put together a committee to look into the issue, and that will give the students a way out, and it’ll give you a way out? It’s not likely that this committee will embrace the solution that the students have chosen at all, but it’ll bring an end to the protests.” And that’s what happened. We appointed a committee, the students were able to claim the victory and walk out of the building, and we were able go back into our offices and basically say that we were happy nobody had been hurt, and that we would trust the new committee to make very good recommendations about what should be done in the future.

    Q: You wrote that you were “taken aback” by how quickly presidents brought in police to break up protest encampments last spring. What other tactics do you believe they should have considered first?

    A: Obviously, every situation is different, so there’s no one general thing you can do. But there is a way which you can call for the judiciary to step in. If students are identified as being in the protest, if the [judiciary] tells them to evacuate whatever building they happen to be occupying or whatever they’re doing wrong, they can be held in contempt of court if they don’t obey those admonitions. That’s a very good substitute for bringing in the police; if you’re held in contempt of court, it’s a very serious crime, and very few students want to do that, so they tend to leave right away. We had tried that at Princeton, and that seemed to be a good substitute for actually calling the police, which led, of course, to terrible things at Columbia and elsewhere, when the police tended to just brutalize the students when they were called in.

    Another alternative, of course, is to wait out the students in the hope that sooner or later, their academic needs will force them to go back out and get to their studies. That was a tactic we also used at Princeton.

    Q: What do you think about the institutional neutrality movement?

    A: I’m a little bit skeptical about the conception and certainly the term of neutrality. I understand why people would embrace the idea at the University of Chicago, for example, and other places. I think that’s a very interesting point of view, and I think at times it’s definitely the thing to do. You don’t want to go around commenting all the time on what has happened internationally or nationally. At the same time, it’s a very difficult row to hoe, because there simply are some events that require, if not an actual stance by the university, certainly some kind of an analysis with a possible outcome. I do think that there are times when it’s important for a leader to speak out, and it has to be done very thoughtfully, and one has to choose those moments carefully.

    Q: Any advice for today’s college presidents on how to handle campus protests?

    A: That’s a tough one. I think what they’re doing is about as good as can be done, and that’s clarifying what is legitimate as a protest or what is not legitimate and being willing to discipline students if they really cross the line of what’s permissible in an obstructive way that harms other people’s capacity to do their jobs. I hope the universities are open to discussing in a more collaborative way things that need to be ironed out, other than simply responding with police force. The more they can discuss and analyze and find ways to reason with the students and even some faculty … the more they are able to possibly defuse protest or the threat of protest.

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  • Rosemont College to Merge With Villanova

    Rosemont College to Merge With Villanova

    Rosemont College will merge with its much larger neighbor, Villanova University, joining two private, Catholic institutions in the Philadelphia area, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

    The small college, located less than a mile from Villanova, will be renamed Villanova University, Rosemont Campus, in a move that seems more akin to an acquisition than a merger. Tenured and tenure-track faculty at Rosemont will reportedly be offered teaching contacts.

    Like many small colleges, Rosemont has faced financial and enrollment challenges recently. 

    Rosemont’s enrollment stood at 777 students in fall 2023, according to recent federal data. While that number was higher than the two preceding years, it fell short of the 902 students Rosemont enrolled in 2019, or in previous years when the college typically surpassed the 1,000 mark.

    Public financial records show that Rosemont operated at a loss in the last four fiscal years. Amid the financial struggles, Rosemont has borrowed $7 million from its endowment—recently valued at $23 million—since 2020. A recent audit indicated “substantial doubt” that Rosemont would be able to remain open if its financial struggles persisted.

    During the merger process—which is expected to be completed in 2028, pending regulatory approvals—Rosemont will stay open and operate independently, with financial support from Villanova. But officials told the Inquirer they will stop accepting new students in October.

    The Rosemont merger comes after Cabrini University, another small private college in the Philadelphia region, closed in May 2024. Villanova purchased Cabrini’s campus soon afterward.

    Financial challenges have battered colleges in the Keystone State in recent years, with three institutions announcing closures last year. Another, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, ended its degree programs but remains open as a museum. More closures are on the horizon as Pennsylvania State University considers a plan to shutter up to 12 of its campuses.

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  • Survey: Trump Policies Push 75% of Scientists to Consider Leaving U.S.

    Survey: Trump Policies Push 75% of Scientists to Consider Leaving U.S.

    Survey: Trump Policies Push 75% of Scientists to Consider Leaving U.S.

    kathryn.palmer…

    Tue, 04/01/2025 – 03:00 AM

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  • Tribal Colleges Fear for Their Federal Funding

    Tribal Colleges Fear for Their Federal Funding

    Leaders of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College were thrilled to find out two years ago that they won a nearly $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to promote Indigenous food and agriculture practices. That five-year grant, which is roughly the same amount as the college’s endowment, funded student internships and several staff positions.

    But just as the college was gearing up to work on the project after putting in place the initial pieces, like selecting interns, funds for the program ceased when the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture froze the grant in February.

    The college has already spent about half a million dollars on the project, expecting those funds would be reimbursed, like other government grants, said Twyla Baker, president of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College. Now, six students have lost their internships, and the college is scrambling to reassign staff to other projects to avoid having to let anyone go.

    “We don’t have a timeline or any type of information as to when or if that [funding] will be restored to us,” Baker said.

    She and other tribal college leaders across the country are scrambling to make contingency plans as the Trump administration continues to review, freeze and slash federal grants in a massive effort to downsize government and roll back federal programs they perceive as related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Some have already seen grants disappear, while others are preparing just in case. Meanwhile, staff cuts to the Bureau of Indian Education and the Department of Education—not to mention plans to dismantle the department—are exacerbating fears and uncertainty on campuses.

    Tribal college leaders watched nervously as the two tribal colleges administered by the bureau, Haskell Indian Nation University and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, experienced major layoffs in February, spurring a lawsuit from tribes and students. The cuts sent the two institutions into what some worried was a death spiral, with professor-less classes and mounting infrastructure problems, until those layoffs were reversed in recent weeks.

    We’re survivors, and we’ll be here, but it’s going to be a rough couple years, that’s for sure.”

    —Dan King, president of Red Lake Nation College

    The country’s 37 tribal colleges already live a precarious existence. They tend to serve small, disproportionately first-generation and low-income student populations in remote areas on or near reservations and operate on lean budgets. They depend heavily on federal dollars, and many campuses are struggling with crumbling infrastructure thanks to chronic underfunding from Congress. Some tribal college presidents fear even small changes to federal funding or staffing could mean losing critical student supports, services and academic programs or risk the most vulnerable institutions closing altogether.

    “It takes so many different tiny little grant programs and resources woven all across the federal government just to keep the doors open and the lights on,” said Moriah O’Brien, vice president of congressional and federal relations at the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. “Any interruption or disruption or pausing of federal funding and resources or the federal employees that support those programs … could have very disruptive impacts.”

    ‘Sitting and Waiting’

    Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College isn’t the only tribal college waiting on frozen USDA funds. College of Menominee Nation in Wisconsin, for example, found out that a grant covering 20 student scholarships was suspended, putting those students’ continued enrollment in jeopardy, ProPublica reported.

    Baker worries other federal funding sources could be next. At this time of the year, she normally would have received a request for proposals for Title III grants from the Department of Education by now. (Title III funds help to support infrastructure improvements at tribal colleges as well as other minority-serving institutions.)

    “We’re sitting and waiting,” she said. “And if those dollars go away, it’s another colossal loss.” Tribal colleges received roughly $82 million in discretionary and mandatory Title III funds last year.

    Amid the uncertainty, tribal colleges are tightening their belts. Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College is considering a travel moratorium and looking into ways to strengthen partnerships with foundations and state lawmakers in hopes of diversifying its funding. Although Red Lake Nation College in Minnesota hasn’t had its grants suspended, the college has frozen hiring, pay increases and nonessential travel. Red Lake Nation is aiming to cut spending by 20 to 25 percent to prepare for any future funding losses.

    Dan King, president of Red Lake Nation, said he’s been trying to stress to others, “We’re going to make it through this … We’re survivors, and we’ll be here, but it’s going to be a rough couple years, that’s for sure.”

    O’Brien said that AIHEC is working to assess how many institutions have had grants suspended and how colleges are responding to this moment of uncertainty. In the meantime, the group is working to educate federal policymakers about tribal colleges—namely that the federal government is obligated to support them by treaty and that funding for tribal colleges is unrelated to DEI.

    “The federal government’s unique responsibilities to tribal nations have been repeatedly reaffirmed by the Supreme Court, legislation, executive orders and regulations … and this legal duty and trust responsibility applies across all branches of the federal government,” she said. As a result, the “conversation about tribal sovereignty and the federal trust and treaty obligations is entirely separate and distinct from the conversation around diversity, equity and inclusion.”

    Uncertainty at ED

    Tribal college leaders are also anxiously waiting to see what comes of the Education Department after mass layoffs and President Donald Trump’s order to close it down “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law” and “return authority over education to the States.”

    O’Brien noted that not only do many funding sources for institutions flow out of the department, but 75 percent of tribal college students are also eligible for the Pell Grant, a federal financial aid program for low-income students.

    American Indian communities are incredibly resilient, because we have to be, but [there’s] not an unlimited supply of resources to be resilient with. And so, there’s a breaking point.”

    —Sandra Boham, chief operating officer at Native Forward

    “We want to make sure that there’s no interruption to the resources that are going to TCUs as institutions and to individual tribal citizens who are students,” she said.

    O’Brien also wants to ensure that any funding set aside for tribal colleges, through tribal college–specific or broader federal programs, goes directly to them, rather than being administered by states.

    “It’s not clear that those funds would ever get to TCUs,” she said. Plus, “the trust and treaty obligations are between tribal nations and the federal government,” not the states.

    Cheryl Crazy Bull, president and CEO of the American Indian College Fund, said it’s hard to know what will happen to department programs, so tribal colleges are preparing for all kinds of scenarios, including programs possibly coming under the auspices of other federal agencies.

    “We don’t want the Department of Ed to be dismantled,” she said. “At the same time, if it’s going to be dismantled, what strategies need to be used in order to ensure continued funding?”

    Education Secretary Linda McMahon has said that shutting down the department won’t mean funding cuts and said that core functions will continue.

    But major reductions in force at the Department of Education and other federal agencies have made it difficult for tribal colleges to find out which of their funding streams may be at risk.

    Tribal college leaders stressed that getting through to the right people at the Education Department, the USDA, the Department of the Interior or other federal agencies to ask questions is a challenge in and of itself, let alone budgeting for an uncertain landscape.

    Not being able to even “get ahold of” the people who administer grant programs “causes a lot of worries for people, too,” said King at Red Lake Nation. “It’s very stressful. It’s chaotic and it’s unpredictable right now.”

    What’s at Stake

    Tribal college advocates worry some of these institutions wouldn’t survive federal funding losses.

    While some tribal colleges have managed to scrape together meager endowments, many operate on low reserves. Some have as little as 90 days’ worth of operating funds on hand at any given time, said Sandra Boham, chief operating officer at Native Forward, a Native American scholarship provider, and a former president of Salish Kootenai College.

    “American Indian communities are incredibly resilient, because we have to be, but [there’s] not an unlimited supply of resources to be resilient with,” she said. “And so, there’s a breaking point.”

    Tribal college leaders are also concerned about the ripple effects if colleges are forced to cut down on student supports and services.

    “You don’t have the big travel budgets to trim,” Boham said. “You don’t have the big athletic budgets to trim. You’re talking support and instructional staff and shuttering buildings or those kinds of things, and that is not a pleasant conversation to have.”

    O’Brien described tribal colleges as “anchors of their community,” as well, that provide “not just individual classes, but often [serve] as a hub for the community, providing all kinds of different [services] from GED classes to certificate programs to community space to having their libraries open to the community.”

    Baker said the value of tribal colleges “is not a difficult story to tell,” but “just the fact that we’re having to tell it is pretty frustrating.”

    Some of these institutions “function on the brink,” Baker said, and they serve “some of the poorest parts of our nation. If it weren’t for tribal colleges, some of these students wouldn’t access higher education at all.”

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  • Historians Defend Smithsonian After Trump’s Order

    Historians Defend Smithsonian After Trump’s Order

    The American Historical Association says that President Trump’s executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution “egregiously misrepresents the work” of the organization and “completely misconstrues the nature of historical work.”

    In the executive order issued late last week, Trump criticized what he saw as “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” that replaces “objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

    The order cites an exhibit at the American Art Museum that examines the “role of sculpture in understanding and constructing the concept of race in the United States,” according to the museum’s website. The order also notes that the “National Museum of African American History and Culture has proclaimed that ‘hard work,’ ‘individualism,’ and ‘the nuclear family’ are aspects of ‘White culture.’”

    The order, titled “Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History,” puts Vice President JD Vance in charge of ensuring that Smithsonian museums, research centers and the National Zoo don’t put on exhibits or programs that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race.”

    The AHA defended the work of historians in the statement released Monday, adding that “historians explore the past to understand how our nation has evolved.”

    “Our goal is neither criticism nor celebration; it is to understand—to increase our knowledge of—the past in ways that can help Americans to shape the future,” said the statement, which has been signed by 16 other organizations. “By providing a history with the integrity necessary to enable all Americans to be all they can possibly be, the Smithsonian is fulfilling its duty to all of us.”

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  • Colonialism-Defending Professor Settles With U of Oregon

    Colonialism-Defending Professor Settles With U of Oregon

    A professor who’s long been controversial for defending colonialism has settled the lawsuit he filed more than two years ago against a former communication manager at the University of Oregon who blocked him from interacting with a university account on Twitter.

    Bruce Gilley—a Portland State University politics and global affairs professor currently serving a stint as A Presidential Scholar in Residence at New College of Florida—filed the lawsuit in August 2022 a former communication manager for the University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion.

    Gilley alleged that the Equity and Inclusion Twitter account published a post urging people to “interrupt racism,” suggesting they use this line: “It sounded like you just said [blank]. Is that really what you meant?” Gilley said he was blocked by the account after retweeting the post with the caption “My entry: … you just said ‘all men are created equal.’”

    Gilley and the University of Oregon reached a settlement agreement last week in which the institution admitted the communication manager blocked Gilley. The university agreed in the settlement that its insurer would pay from $95,000 to $382,000 in attorneys’ fees to Gilley’s representatives—the Institute for Free Speech and the Angus Lee Law Firm—and the institution further agreed to a detailed process to clarify its social media policies and train social media managers on them. There will be an email address for people to complain about being blocked, and the whole plan will have a 180-day supervision period for implementation.

    “The guidelines will more clearly state that third parties and the content they post must not be blocked or deleted based on viewpoint, even if that viewpoint can be viewed by some as ‘offensive,’ ‘racist’ or ‘hateful,’” the settlement agreement says.

    In a statement, the university said it “does not agree that it committed any of the violations alleged in Bruce Gilley’s complaint. The agreement reached between the university and Mr. Gilley ended the lawsuit without admission of liability or fault.”

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  • Wellesley Non-Tenure-Track Strike May Impact Class Credits

    Wellesley Non-Tenure-Track Strike May Impact Class Credits

    Hours after Wellesley College’s non-tenure-track faculty went on strike last Thursday, students received word that they might receive only half credit for courses taught by the professors on strike.

    The college attributed the decision to federal regulations on how much instruction students must receive per credit hour, noting that if the strike ends quickly, students will be able to return to their classes and get full credit. In the meantime, they were told they could sign up for other classes, taught by tenure-track faculty, for the last four weeks of the semester. That would allow them to continue to earn full credit hours, which is especially important for students who need to maintain full-time status for financial aid, athletics or visa-related reasons.

    According to college spokesperson Stacey Schmeidel, only about a third of non-tenure-track faculty members’ classes could be affected by this change; the remaining two-thirds met frequently enough during the first 10 weeks of the semester that they had already reached the required minimum number of instructional hours. Over all, she said, about 30 students out of the 2,350 enrolled at the women’s college are currently at risk of dropping below full-time status, though hundreds opted to switch into new classes to ensure they receive the number of credits they planned on for this semester.

    But students and faculty union members have questioned the college’s solution, noting that students may struggle to find replacement courses that fit their schedule or that they have the necessary prerequisites for.

    “Imagine being a student entering into a class that only has four weeks left,” said Jacquelin Woodford, a chemistry lecturer and organizing committee member for the faculty union, Wellesley Organized Academic Workers. “It’s such a weird plan that could all be avoided if the college just bargained with us and settled the contract.” Woodford also noted that striking faculty members had not been informed before Thursday about this plan and still haven’t received formal communication from the institution about what is happening with their classes.

    Non-tenure-track faculty at Wellesley began unionizing almost a year ago in an attempt to obtain higher wages and better job security. Union organizers say the institution has come back with only bare-bones offers.

    On March 25, administrators offered non-tenure-track faculty 2.75 percent annual raises for the duration of the contract and proposed adding an additional course to their teaching loads, for which they would be paid an additional $10,000. But union members argue that $10,000 is equivalent to what they are already paid for teaching an extra course.

    “The College’s proposal makes working overtime the new, required norm,” wrote Erin Battat, senior lecturer in the writing program and a member of the bargaining committee, in an email to The Wellesley News, the college’s student paper. “We had hoped that Wellesley was serious about their claims to care about averting a strike, but their actions at the bargaining prove otherwise.”

    WOAW’s latest proposal, meanwhile, includes a revised salary scale that would see some NTT faculty with more than 18 years at Wellesley earn over $170,000 a year—25 percent more than full professors with the same amount of experience. Wellesley has countered that the proposed pay scale, which would afford faculty raises of 54 percent in the contract’s first year, is untenable.

    The union voted in February to authorize a strike.

    “We called for a strike authorization vote to encourage Wellesley to make substantial progress towards our key priorities. Our goal is to negotiate a fair contract that will be ratified by our members,” said one bargaining committee member, Christa Skow, senior instructor in biological sciences, in an update on WOAW’s website at the time.

    Pizza and Ponchos

    Students have been supportive of the strike despite its impact on their courses, said Woodford, noting that they have joined the picket lines at the motor and pedestrian entrances to campus over the past several days.

    “They’ll come and go between their courses. They’re so kind; they’ve been sending us food and pizza and they brought us ponchos today for the rain,” she said, noting that tenured colleagues, alumnae and Massachusetts state politicians have also come out to support them.

    The next bargaining session will take place on Tuesday, and union organizers questioned why the institution was unwilling to bargain any earlier than five days into the strike. In an email, Schmeidel said the college and the union had, prior to the strike, mutually agreed to a session on April 3; after the strike began, Wellesley offered to move the session to today, April 1.

    She also said that the union had rejected the college’s proposal to work with a mediator.

    “The College feels that the union’s refusal to go to mediation and to instead call for a strike is arbitrary and premature,” she wrote.

    For some students, it’s unclear what the next few weeks will bring. Jeanne, a freshman who asked to have her last name withheld, is currently taking a writing course impacted by the strike. She said she received an email from the dean of first-year students saying that those in the course would receive full credit, but students should nevertheless attempt to keep up with the syllabus as much as possible. She doubts she’ll be able to, though, as the materials she needs for the next paper haven’t been posted for students to access online yet.

    Still, she said she is in favor of the strike, noting that WOAW has been transparent with the students about what the stoppage will entail since much earlier in the semester.

    “[WOAW] had been speaking about negotiations with the college since I arrived on the campus last semester,” she said. “They’ve been very clear with the students that they believe their treatment is unfair and they’ve been working with the college for a while now to get the situation fixed.”

    In an FAQ about how Wellesley will handle the strike, the institution said it is still figuring out how grading will be impacted by the half-credit courses and noted that it may be necessary to include a transcript note for anyone impacted. It said the same about making up any content students may lose out on as a result of the strike.

    “Department chairs and faculty are thinking seriously about any course content that may not have been covered and how to make up for this in a future semester,” the FAQ says.

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